Democracy, Conflict Management, and Militarized Interstate Disputes

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This project is directed at improving our understanding of the interplay of democracy and third party intermediaries in shaping the contours an outcomes of international conflict. Four empirically testable hypotheses are derived from an evolving theory of democratic norms positing that democratic leaders operate within certain normative constraints to regulate and resolve political conflict both at home and abroad. These hypotheses contend that democracy, working through norms instilled in political leaders, will both influence states' acquiescence to third party conflict managers and condition the effectiveness of their management efforts. The primary objective of the research is to systematically evaluate these hypothesized relationships against the historical record of militarized interstate disputes. Because there were so few fully democratic states in existence prior to World War II, the temporal domain of the study begins in 1946 and extends through 1992, the last year of recorded interstate disputes. Militarized interstate disputes provide a novel and important test bed for these hypotheses, not only because much of what is known about international conflict has been derived from studies of militarized disputes, but also because they constitute the most widely used and thoroughly investigated compilation of interstate conflict episodes currently available. Empirically based answers to the questions raised by these hypotheses are expected to have both theoretical and practical implications for how we understand and deal with international conflict. But this empirical evaluation cannot proceed without systematic identification and documentation of conflict management by third parties, information that does not now exist within the conceptual and operational context of militarized disputes. This collection of new data constitutes a secondary objective of the research, but also entails a side-benefit in the form of a new data resource on international conflict management with potential application well beyond the present study. Thus what is new and distinctive about this effort is that it extends explicit consideration of conflict management to the heretofore uncharted territory of militarized interstate disputes.